


1000 Miles and a Step in the Right Direction

by The Primera Haruoka (TenshiEren14)



Series: Two Breaths, Walking. [2]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: 31 Day Challenge, Aizawa's a good dad, Aizawa's the Champion of Sinnoh, Dabi's trying his best, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Gen, Hitoshi is the kid they picked up along the way, Hizashi's his rich husband, M/M, More tags to be added as it becomes relevant, Pokemon! AU, Romance, Year of PokeAU, dadzawa and shinson
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:21:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22091740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TenshiEren14/pseuds/The%20Primera%20Haruoka
Summary: They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with but the first step but Aizawa knows that journeys begin even before that.He knows a thing or two about journeys, after all.A collection of ficlets and drabbles from the PokeAU.
Relationships: Aizawa Shouta | Eraserhead & Shinsou Hitoshi, Aizawa Shouta | Eraserhead & Yamada Hizashi | Present Mic, Aizawa Shouta | Eraserhead/Yamada Hizashi | Present Mic
Series: Two Breaths, Walking. [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1296488
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	1000 Miles and a Step in the Right Direction

**Author's Note:**

> Well! Here we are guys! The Year of PokeAU! It's finally happening!
> 
> I want to thank everyone that's read Curious Contradiction and shown interest in the tiny bits and pieces of this universe Mae and I have been building for just about 2 years now. Chronological stuff'll come, I swear but for now, I hope you guys enjoy these drabbles and one-shots for EM-January. 
> 
> Context: Prompt: Small Things  
> Character ages: Aizawa: 32  
> Hitoshi: 9  
> Hizashi: 32  
> Dabi: 23  
> Aizawa's Champion of Sinnoh, Hitoshi still attends Trainer School.

Father becomes a different person when dad leaves for work.

It’s a small change, things that on their own are so obscure that most people don’t really notice unless they know what to look for. Hitoshi isn’t most people. 

It’s not a sudden thing. Hitoshi can understand just a little bit why people don’t notice it because Father is stern and subtle, and his metamorphoses are akin to the earth as it drags itself into newer forms. Hitoshi sees it in the way he wakes him up a half hour early a week after dad’s left, sits with him and checks through Hitoshi’s homework with the Teddiursa pencil Hitoshi stole from Mina’s pencil case when she last visited. He sees it when Father asks him what he wants for breakfast instead of giving him tea or soup, hears it in the stifling silence that fills the house like thunderclouds stuffing themselves tight on the unassuming sky. 

Father joins him for morning training, doesn’t comment when Dabi rolls into existence from beyond their brush of coffee trees and stretches out his shoulders like he spent the night curled close to the soil. He feeds his Hydreigon silently, coaxes his Honchkrow down from her nighttime post with clicks and rumbles rather than syllables or words. He only spares a glance when one of Dabi’s blows hit a too tender spot in Hitoshi’s arm, shuffles inside with his usual meander but none of the purpose. He only offers bandages when he returns. 

Three weeks in and he doesn’t let Dabi drop him to school anymore. At least, not alone. Father hates the press more than he hates the attention they bring so Hitoshi arrives in Jubilife an hour early with a bagful of completed homework and feet full of energy. He people watches usually, sits with his Malamar that had become just ‘Mal’ somewhere along the winding trail of time and observes the city as it shakes itself awake and becomes the metropolis it fancies itself to be. Mina says that Jubilife is still just a town compared to Castelia, says that money never sleeps so Castelia doesn’t either. Hitoshi just thinks that sounds exhausting. 

It’s just Hitoshi and his Malamar and his phone and when Hitoshi isn’t watching the people, he’s watching the open messenger window, counting down the seconds on his mental fingers before either Shouto or Mina say good morning. Shouto’s usually awake by this point, he trains just like Hitoshi does. Mina’s more unpredictable. Sometimes she’s in school, other times she’s out doing field work. She says she wants to be a Poison Specialist but she’s attending Unova’s highest ranking Ranger Academy. Hitoshi doesn’t really get it but it’s making her happy. He supposes that’s all that matters. 

There’s a message waiting for him when he blinks himself out of his thoughts. Malamar’s been lightly napping next to him, his tentacles curled around Hitoshi’s waist and holding him closer than he generally appreciates but Mal’s face is peaceful so he allows it just this once. It’s a message from dad. A picture of him up to his nose in wide brimmed plants and tree trunks so brown they look black. He’s smiling, naturally, the roots of his red hair hidden beneath his favourite tan boater hat with the neon green on white stripe. Most of his hair’s been braided, and he’s holding a wild looking berry that’s pink with white stripes.  _ ‘Something for the garden :DD’,  _ the caption reads. 

Hitoshi forwards the picture to his father. 

* * *

He doesn’t really know why dad’s work calls him away for as long as it does--doesn’t even really understand  _ what _ it is that he does. The people on the telly call it ‘philanthropy’. Dad just calls it teaching. Hitoshi’s never asked his father after the first time. Father’s dark eyes became stormy and he looked at Hitoshi without seeing him at all. ‘Feeding his wanderlust’ father had called it. Hitoshi didn’t bother asking him what the word meant, not when it made Father become solemn yet soft all in the same breath. 

When dad leaves to feed his wanderlust, he leaves a him-shaped hole in their house. 

Father doesn’t rush to fill it all at once. Doesn’t really try to fill it at all. He doesn’t try to pretend that things are the same and that somehow, magically, he can be what Hizashi is to Hitoshi. Instead he does what he can and makes up for what he can’t with compromises. Hitoshi sees it in the blunt, brisk post-it notes he sticks onto the sandwich bag that holds his lunch for the day. It will never be dad’s bright, cheery smiley-doodles, words that always manage to get a smile from Hitoshi’s lips. It is different. An adjustment. Dull words written in dull black with a dull full stop as its only punctuation. Hitoshi folds it up to add it to his collection all the same. 

Father adjusts himself in the way he interacts with the house as well. 

He never sleeps in their room while dad is gone. Instead he pulls out this atrocious sleeping bag--Scatterbug print, a gift from a Christmas or birthday or anniversary celebrated long before Hitoshi was an idea in the cells of the universe--and sets it up in the living room. When he’s not napping there, he naps in Hitoshi’s bed. Father sleeps like a stone; heavy, dense and static and its different from the Father who tucks himself beneath dad’s chin while blunt fingertips scrabble along the silk of dad’s blond, blond hair. If Hitoshi waits long enough, Father’s scarred fingers find their way into his hair in the dead of night and he’ll soothe Hitoshi to sleep with rough lullabies Father’s forgotten the words to in a language he only speaks behind closed doors. 

* * *

Somewhere between the three and four month mark, Father begins to deteriorate. 

He wakes up the same time, wakes Hitoshi up for the same time, asks the same questions, goes through all of the same motions but it’s the little things that give him away. It starts with him skipping breakfast, replacing it with one of those awful tasting supplements that Hitoshi’s rather sure is supposed to be for his Pokemon. He sits at the table with Hitoshi, keeps his hair down and ragged and Hitoshi knows from the scrappy ends that he hasn’t bothered brushing it for two or three days now. He doesn’t offer unnecessary words, never tries to artificially fill the silence that seems to blanket the house when it’s just him and Hitoshi and the walls around them, but he’s reading the morning paper without actually reading so just this once, Hitoshi’s the first to stir up conversation. 

It rapidly gets worse. Well, as rapidly as Father would allow himself to spiral. 

One breakfast becomes a string of meals and when they’re out of the icky stuff, Father just prefers to go without; zips himself up in his Scatterbug sleeping bag and sleeps the hunger off. He doesn’t neglect anything. Not his Pokemon, not his responsibilities, not Hitoshi but he stops bathing every day, drinks more tea than water, probably spends more time sleeping than he does awake. 

Hitoshi wonders if the Elite Four notice that their Champion is out of it. 

Uncle Hakamata’s eyes are sharp and Aunt Miruko is the pushy sort when she has the motivation, he wants to believe that they’ll take care of his father when he’s at work and sitting for five hour intervals doing nothing but paperwork and brooding. As for him, he lets Father continue to spiral for seven days before he gets up and takes his homework to the living room. Father’s cocoon is zipped up tight, not even the strands of his lank hair dripping from between the teeth of the zipper but Hitoshi ignores all the signs screaming that he wants to be left alone and instead puts one of dad’s terribly loud rock CDs into the TV and puts the volume up to the highest it can go. 

Father’s upset obviously, flips himself over and unzips his casing, contorting himself up and out of the bag like some eldritch abomination deprived of sleep and starving for souls. Hitoshi stands his ground. 

It’s a hard battle but in the end they go out for pizza. 

Father takes a bath only because Hitoshi offers to wash his hair and he doesn’t bother to fix it when Hitoshi abuses that privilege and styles his hair in pigtails held up with mismatched laces instead of the neat hair-elastics sitting imploringly on their bureau. Hitoshi doesn’t comment when Father slips on dad’s clothes instead of his own. Dabi doesn’t have any such restraint. 

They’re halfway through the pizza they ordered (Dabi tried to start up the pineapple argument but Father shut him down by getting a side order of just anchovies and pointedly making his way through that) when Hitoshi’s phone vibrates. 

It’s dad again. Another picture of him but he’s laying in the grass with his hair spread out around him, a halo of aureate that catches the starlight and sparkles in the dew. That doesn’t distract Hitoshi from the tiredness in his eyes, from the extra wrinkle between his brows that only crease that noticeably when he’s been stressed. He’s smiling despite that, a quiet smile that warms Hitoshi’s chest and makes his eyes itch in a place he couldn’t feasibly scratch.

_ ‘Taking care of Pa for me?’ _

Hitoshi considers the week, the protein shakes, the missing gaps of time, the run-down nature of Father. His stomach bubbles when he thinks about the bags that have multiplied beneath Father’s fathomless eyes, the way he could see the lines of Father’s clavicle as it pressed against his thin, translucent skin while he washed his hair. And then he looks up, blinks when he sees Dabi try to steal an anchovy off of dad’s platter and get stabbed with the fork for his troubles. He sees a slice of pizza carefully nibbled away but no where near finished. 

_ ‘I’m working on it,’  _ he types back. 

* * *

Somehow, they make it through the next two months together. 

Father keeps their boat steady and Hitoshi keeps Father on his feet. Sometimes things get rocky, Father shuts down for a few hours and he simply thumbs the ring around his neck, sits on the porch steps and looks out onto the horizon with an air of sadness too deep to simply be called sad. Sometimes the pictures dad sends do more harm than good and Father, who doesn’t try to be what he can never be, simply isn’t enough to handle the dad-shaped longing that burns Hitoshi’s throat and blurs his vision. Sometimes they shut down together and no one eats but everyone sleeps and when they wake, Dabi’s the one in the kitchen clattering about like he knows how to make anything that isn’t just fire. He holds the house hostage, threatens to actually turn the stove on like he could figure it out. Father’s called his bluff before. He never does on days like these. 

When the six months are up and the three of them head to Snowpoint to collect their phantom limb, Hitoshi thinks about Father and the man he’s lived with for this period. The Father who is more melancholy than menace, whose glare is undermined by the slump in his shoulder, the powerful figure who slips powerlessness on like a well-worn coat and makes himself prostrate to its thrall. He wonders if dad knows. Wonders if dad would stop leaving if he knew. Wonders why Father never stops him from going. 

Dad’s already waiting for them when they arrive at the port, his roots have grown out and the red hair that Father prefers is long enough that the hair slipped behind his ear is red at the tips. He’s still dressed light, his knees are knocking together from below his board shorts and Hitoshi wants to yell into the ocean because even from this distance he can see how thin that shirt is. Father doesn’t even bat an eye at it, pulls out a coat from the paper bag he had brought with them and wraps it over dad’s shoulders. Time stops for a moment as dad meets his eyes, Father’s fingers linger on the stubbly line of dad’s jaw. It looks like it physically hurts for them to pull away. 

Dad catches his gaze then. Bounds up in two great strides like he hadn’t just been weak in the knees for Father and picks Hitoshi up like he’s eight and still unsteady in the snow. He spins him around, yells and laughs and whoops. Coos about how much he’s missed him. Hitoshi carefully pushes down the bitter thought that threatens to become words, the ‘if you missed me so much then why do you keep leaving?’ that he’s been burying for months now. 

Dabi tries for a polite, detached greeting but dad just gathers his wiry frame in his equally wiry arms and crushes him in a hug. At this point, Hitoshi isn’t sure if it’s genuine joy or if dad’s just fishing for body heat. 

Father stands next to him, a fond smile barely peeking out from the dreary curtain of his face and Hitoshi sighs. He offers Father his hand and he takes it. It’s cold, like always, frigid in the fingertips and numb in the palm. He rubs Father’s hands between his own, smiles when Father huffs out a laugh at his efforts and ruffles his hair in turn. 

Dad calls out to them, ever the whirlwind of energy and the bitterness evaporates into relief, into normalcy. Into rightness. 

The walk home is noisy, filled with tinkling laughter and bright guffaws and Hitoshi sees the light in Father’s eyes that’s been absent since these six months started. He squeezes his hand, keeps his head straight so Father doesn’t know he’s watching him. Thanks the stars that the small things are back in place and Father’s back to being himself again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to ask questions and leave a comment! I don't really know how well people will be able to follow with this, but I want to know what I can do to make it easier to understand! 
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
